Nordic writers keep alive a troubled, brilliant hacker created by Stieg Larsson Premium

Lisbeth Salander returns in Smirnoff's The Girl in the Eagle's Talons, the seventh book in the Millennium series. It is part of the "Nordic noir" genre, which began with Sjöwall and Wahlöö's 1965 novel Roseanna and was popularized by Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. The Girl in the Eagle's Talons follows Salander and Blomkvist as they investigate a shady councilman in the Swedish far north. It is a classic mystery with a closed circle of suspects and clues, and is more meditative than the original trilogy. Smirnoff, the first woman to write the Millennium series, has given the series a forward momentum, ensuring its place in the high table of Nordic noir.

Lisbeth Salander returns in the seventh book of the Millennium series with Karin Smirnoff’s The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons. Lisbeth, the brilliant, bisexual, tattooed and troubled computer hacker made her debut in journalist Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2005. While there are different theories to her genesis, with Larsson being quite the unreliable narrator, apart from introducing a bunch of novels with “The Girl” in the title into the world, Lisbeth was also responsible for the latest wave of fascination for “Nordic noir”.

Though the term “Nordic noir” gained currency in the 2010s, being coined by the Scandinavian Department at the University College of London, the beginnings of the genre could be found in Swedish journalists Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s stories of Stockholm police detective, Martin Beck, through 10 novels from Roseanna (1965) to Terroristerna (The Terrorists/1975).

Henning Mankell’s books, featuring inspector Kurt Wallander solving horrific crimes in Ystad in Sweden in the 1990s, brought the genre into the mainstream. There have been other writers who have made their presence felt including Norwegian Jo Nesbo with Inspector Harry Hole, siblings from Denmark Lotte and Søren Hammer with their deeply disturbing books featuring Detective Konrad Simonsen and Håkan Nesser with Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti.

Nordic or Scandinavian noir are mainly police procedurals where bleakly beautiful snowscapes hide brutal crimes. Like all police procedurals, there is routine police work including going to give evidence in court, multiple cases etc. — it is not like everything is dropped to follow up on this one case. It is also teamwork that cracks the case, not a flash of inspiration from a little egg headed foreigner with magnificent moustaches. The detective leading the investigation, while blessed with insight and a way of making obscure connections, is no superhuman. Wallander struggles with diabetes, a failed marriage and poignantly dementia in the 12th Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Like Peter James’ Roy Grace novels, set in Brighton, which have a running mystery in the disappearance of Grace’s wife, Sandy, there are Nordic noir novels with a continuing mystery around members of the team alongside the main mystery in the book. Mathematician and IT consultant turned author Carin Gerhardsen’s The Hammarby Series, while telling of Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his team solving crimes in Stockholm, also features mysteries of one of the officers’ past and another’s date rape.

The fact that only three of the eight novels are translated from Swedish into English is a mighty sore point as one has no way of knowing the resolution to those particular mysteries.

Though Larsson’s Millennium series provided another mighty push for Nordic noir, it differs from the others by putting the amateur sleuth in the driving seat. Despite all the horrors of human trafficking, animal harm, mutilation, unbridled savagery and neo-Nazis, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, at its heart, a tribute to Agatha Christie. We have the amateur sleuths in Salander and disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist; the rich industrialist, Vanger who is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his favourite great niece, Harriet, from the remote island of Hedeby 40 years ago and the large dysfunctional family all hiding horrid secrets. It is a classic mystery with a closed circle of suspects and clues hidden in the Bible, old newspaper photographs, and puzzling pressed flowers.